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And so it came to pass that about the year Eighteen Hundred Thirteen, this Percy Bysshe Shelley called on Godwin, who was living in a rusty, musty tenement in Somerstown. The young man was twenty: tall and slender, with as handsome a face as was ever given to mortal.
It had been cut from the head of a man, who, unconscious, simple as a child, lived out the law of his nature, and set the world at defiance, Bysshe Shelley. The Doctor, talking to her father, watched the girl furtively, took in every point, as one might critically survey a Damascus blade which he was going to carry into battle.
However this might be, Bysshe Shelley, though a scion of a good old English family, had wandered in strange lands, and it was whispered that he had seen strange sights and done strange things. According to one legend, he had been married in America, though no one knew whether his wife was white or black, or how he had got rid of her.
Percy Bysshe Shelley has done something which in the case of other men is called a grave crime; it must be shown that in his case it is not that, because he does not think as other men do about these things. Ought not that to be enough, if the fabulist is serious?
"When Bysshe finally came to town to elope with Miss Westbrook, he came as usual to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and I was his companion on his visits to her, and finally accompanied them early one morning I forget now the month, or the date, but it might have been September in a hackney coach to the Green Dragon, in Gracechurch Street, where we remained all day, till the hour when the mail-coaches start, when they departed in the northern mail for York."
Adelbert Bysshe, rector of the Church of England chapel, had held a secret conclave the night before at the squire's house. It was believed that the signs were the result, and intimated in certain obscure quarters that Pete Ellinwood, who had always claimed literary aspirations, had printed them. Odd Fellows' Hall was the biggest and most pretentious building in Freekirk Head.
Bradlaugh's National Reformer with the signature "B. V.," the initials of "Bysshe Vanolis," a rather characteristic nom de guerre which Thomson had taken to express his admiration for Shelley directly, and for Novalis by anagram. Some of it, however, emerged into a wider hearing, and attracted the favourable attention of men like Kingsley and Froude.
The first child of this marriage, born on August 4, 1792, was the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, born to all the ease and comfort of an English country home, but with the weird imaginings which in childhood could people the grounds and surroundings with ancient snakes and fairies of all forms, and which later on were to lead him far out of the beaten track.
Toward an ordinary English youth, ready to sow his wild oats at college, and willing to settle at the proper age and take his place upon the bench of magistrates, Sir Timothy Shelley would have shown himself an indulgent father; and it must be conceded by the poet's biographer that if Percy Bysshe had but displayed tact and consideration on his side, many of the misfortunes which signalized his relations to his father would have been avoided.
Before quitting, once and for all, the arid region of genealogy, it may be worth mentioning that Sir Bysshe Shelley by his second marriage with Miss Elizabeth Jane Sydney Perry, heiress of Penshurst, became the father of five children, the eldest son of whom assumed the name of Shelley-Sidney, received a baronetcy, and left a son, Philip Charles Sidney, who was created Lord De l'Isle and Dudley.
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